True color night vision correlated imaging based on intensity correlation of light

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel night vision imaging method that uses intensity correlation of light to produce true color images from infrared data, offering improved colorfulness and natural appearance over traditional pseudo-color methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a new technique for night vision imaging based on spatial intensity correlation, enabling direct color image reconstruction without pseudo-color processing.

Findings

Color night vision images with quality comparable to visible light imaging.

Reconstructed images have significantly better colorfulness index.

The method produces more natural color images than pseudo-color approaches.

Abstract

Night vision imaging is a technology that converts non-visible object to human eyes into visible image in night and other low light environments. However, the conventional night vision imaging can only directly produce grayscale image. Here, we propose a novel night vision imaging method based on intensity correlation of light. The object's information detected by infrared non-visible light is expressed by visible light via the spatial intensity correlation of light. With simple data processing, a color night vision image can be directly produced by this approach without any pseudo-color image processing. Theoretical and experimental results show that a color night vision image comparable to classical visible light imaging quality can be obtained by this method. Surprisingly, the color colorfulness index of the reconstructed night vision image is significantly better than that of the conventional visible light image and pseudo-color night vision image. Although the reconstructed image can not completely restore the natural color of the object, the color image obtained by this method is more natural sense than that obtained by other pseudo-color image processing methods.